It’s one thing churning out blog post after blog post, even if it’s about a topic you’re deeply passionate about, but it’s another thing altogether actually monetising your blog and essentially generating an income out of operating your blog. The life of a professional blogger is made up of a few essentials which the average onlooker may not be all too aware of, particularly the life of a professional travel blogger as that appears to be one of the hottest topics covered by bloggers.
So what is it exactly that you need if you want to be a professional travel blogger, in other words a travel blogger who actually makes money from their blog?
A Set of Sellable Skills
It is indeed true that it takes a lot of time and effort to reach that sweet place in a travel blogger’s life where your blog generates a passive income, or as passive an income as a blogger’s income can get. I’m talking about that place where you perhaps have some affiliate links on your blogs or advertisements which operate on a pay-per-click or earn-per-purchase basis, requiring very little active input from you apart from focussing on the core activity of writing new blog posts which ideally document your travels. For a blog to reach that level a lot of hard work would have had to go into it, often without any remuneration at all, so that’s what I mean about acquiring a sellable skill as one of the essentials of a professional travel blogger.
The most common sellable skills professional travel bloggers develop include the likes of photography, writing (obviously) and any other digital skill which can either be sold separately for money or it can be used to generate money as part of the process of building your blog up. I mean there’s a reason why a certain professional blogger might insist on snapping pics with nothing other than their Canon Eos 5d camera – they might be raking in some big bucks between snapping pics for their travel blog by perhaps submitting a lot of their polished and edited pics to online stock photography platforms as a means through which to generate some money they can live on. The ultimate focus is still on the blog however, although this sellable skill forms part of the process and brings in some money to perhaps fund some of the travels and gather some much-needed “ammunition” to set the blog on its way.
Professional Equipment
The last thing you want as a professional travel blogger is to be stuck in a situation that prevents you from documenting your travels and all which you get up to on your travels. So you need some basic professional tools, such as a fully functional laptop that allows you to connect to the internet in a number of different ways, a good camera (a smartphone camera can only take you so far), a backup facility such as cloud storage space and the appropriate word processing and image editing software.
